


Lady and the Tiger

by Sholio



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 12:01:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15885630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: AU. Nakia takes the Herb on the mountainside.





	Lady and the Tiger

**Author's Note:**

> For my "first transformation" h/c bingo square.

They were only halfway up the mountain when Killmonger's troops caught them. Or W'Kabi's men, more accurately -- but there was no difference between them now, Nakia thought grimly.

The wind screamed down the mountain, swirling snow beneath her cloak. Her hands, curled protectively around the Heart-Shaped Herb, had grown numb. She could not fight like this; carrying the Herb cradled against her own body, she could barely even climb, and would have fallen a dozen times if not for Ross boosting her forward, helping her while Ramonda and Shuri helped each other.

They'd had to leave the trail behind; they had no choice. They had led their pursuers in a desperate scramble across snow-covered rocks, but as darkness began to come down on them, Nakia didn't know how long their strength would hold out. They had no food, no proper footwear.

They collapsed for a short rest in the shelter of a rock face -- what little shelter it offered. Shuri, with shaking hands, pressed her fingers to a kimoyo bead and traced a ring around the four of them with it. "This will shield us from sensors for a short while," she said, her teeth chattering. "But they will find us eventually. All they have to do is follow our tracks in the snow."

She took three more beads, pressed each of them until it lit up blue, and passed them around. Whatever Shuri had done had activated their vibranium, and they were so warm to the touch that they hurt on cold-sensitized skin. Nakia freed a hand from the Herb to clumsily tuck hers underneath her cloak, while Ross cupped his hands around his.

Ramonda wrapped her cloak around herself and Shuri, and looked up at Nakia in the gathering darkness. "You must take the Herb," she said softly. 

"I cannot!"

"We will not make it to M'Baku like this. They've cut us off. You are our only hope, Nakia. You know this."

"I am a spy," she protested. "I have no army. I have no _chance._ The Herb is our only hope. We must not waste it on me."

"Who else?" Ramonda demanded. She glanced around as she spoke, her pained gaze raking across Ross and then dropping more softly to her daughter's head, pressed to Ramonda's shoulder. "An outsider. A child. An old woman. There is no one else here who can answer Bast's call. You _must._ The alternative is to lose the Herb ... and Wakanda."

A distant cry from below made all of them tense. Ramonda drew Shuri closer to her.

"They found our trail," Ross said softly. He looked around for a weapon and picked up a snow-covered rock.

Nakia closed her eyes. Ramonda was right. There was no choice. "What do you need to prepare it?" she asked in quiet capitulation.

Ramonda found a flat rock to use for a mortar, another for a pestle to grind with. With Shuri holding the mortar steady, and Ross standing guard over them with one of Nakia's ring blades gripped clumsily in both hands, Nakia decanted the Herb from her hands into the hollow of the rock. It tingled as it left her palms. Ramonda bowed her head -- she looked as if she'd aged ten years in this one night -- and ground it. In the cold air, the paste of the Herb smoked as if it had been heated in a fire.

Nakia shuddered and put aside her cloak. Wearing only her light palace clothes, she lay down in the snow.

"Good God," Ross said, sounding shocked. "Don't you want a blanket or something?"

"We must cover her," Shuri replied, but she sounded unsure. None of them knew what they were doing, not really. The ritual had never been done like this before.

"I'm all right," Nakia forced herself to say, with what small part of her attention could be spared from the effort it took to force herself to remain flat in the achingly cold snow. She had thought she was already as cold as she could get. She had been very wrong. It hurt down to her bones. 

Ramonda's hand cupped under her head, strong fingers wrapping around the base of her skull and lifting her until the rough stone of the Herb's makeshift receptacle touched her lips. It was the last chance to turn back, she thought. Looking up against the fading light in the sky, she saw all three of them looking down at her: Shuri and Ross looking desperately worried, Ramonda wearing the same look of resigned sorrow that she had had since her son's death. Nakia managed to smile at them, and opened her mouth as the rough stone scraped across her lips.

The Herb seemed to have no taste at first. It was like drinking water. And then the pain began, spreading under her skin until she thought she would be torn apart. 

As a War Dog, she had been beaten and tortured in other lands; she had starved and thirsted with refugees under foreign suns. This was worse than anything she had ever felt before. Despite the cold, her body ran with sweat as she struggled not to scream. She heard the voices of the others, but they had receded to a distant hum in which she could distinguish nothing except the note of worry. She was burning, she was dying, she was being torn apart --

The cold came as a relief, a lesser pain that distracted her from the greater pain of the Herb. The cold covered her, one scooped palmful of snow at a time. She was drowning in it, and it occurred to her, in some distant part of her mind not consumed with agony, that she really might die: she was not of the line of the protectors, and she realized that no one had ever told her if Bast accepted everyone who was willing to consume the Herb, nor what happened to those who were rejected.

And then she opened her eyes abruptly to a cessation of pain so great that she nearly wept.

She was lying among reeds. She sat up slowly, stretching out her limbs to test them. It was evening or perhaps dawn, that twilight time when the world bathed in golden light, and she was on a riverbank. As a child, she had played thus, running free in the weeds and marsh while wearing a vibranium necklace to generate a forcefield that would keep her safe from crocodiles or drowning. The memory of childhood was so vivid that she touched her throat, expecting to find the necklace there, but instead she touched her own bare skin. And her hands were not those of a child. They were strong hands, a grown woman's hands, marked with small scars from fighting and training and torture.

She stood up and looked around her. In the real Wakanda, her river was framed by distant mountains; as a child she used to think the mountains held up the sky. Here, there was nothing but river. The marshy plain stretched endless and golden, as far as she could see in every direction, with gleaming loops of the river sprawling across it. Standing on the utterly flat plain, with the reeds to block her view, she knew she should not be able to see the river as far or as clearly as she could. It was an idea of a river, she thought, more than a real one.

And it was eerily silent, devoid of the bird calls that filled the marsh where she had grown up. The only sound was the faint whisper of the wind in the reeds. When something splashed in the water near her, it made her jump and turn, reaching for ring blades she was not wearing here. She watched a crocodile surface and then sink below the water until only its eyes and the top of its snout still showed. 

"Hello, grandmother," she murmured with a small smile. "You gave me a bit of a start. I don't suppose you're here to tell me what to do."

The crocodile sank in a swirl of ripples. "I suppose not," Nakia said to herself, and then she looked beyond the crocodile's wake to see a boat vanishing, likewise, below the river's brown surface. Only its carved stern was visible, just disappearing in a vortex of bubbles and roiling water.

"Mother!" The cry was torn from her throat. She leaped forward on pure instinct and flung herself into the water. She had been able to do nothing that day. The adults had held her and later her mother's body was recovered from the wreckage. Now she threw herself forward, and lukewarm water closed over her head. Her feet touched the muddy bottom, and she stood up in shock, streaming water from all over her body. Her feet were planted firmly on the bottom. The river -- _this_ river -- only came up to her knees.

"Mother!" she cried, turning around wildly. There was only the rippling marsh in all directions. "Mother! _Mother!"_

"Calm down, child. You'll rupture something."

The voice was familiar and dearly loved, unheard since childhood. But when she looked around, she saw nothing.

"Mother!"

"Come back to the bank. It is not good to stay in the water too long. You'll ruin your skin."

"You always used to say that," Nakia sniffled. Wiping her eyes, she waded to the bank and climbed out. This time, she saw the speaker among the reeds. She sat down and watched the orb-weaver spider carefully adding strands to the most elaborate web she had ever seen. "A spider, Mother? Really?"

"You come from a long line of weavers, my child. I always loved it above anything." The spider danced lightly across its web, tweaking the strands just so. Light glinted along the lines of the web, tracing it out in faint hints of vibranium blue. "Above all things except you, of course."

Nakia wiped her eyes again. "I took the Herb, Mother."

"I know," her mother said complacently. "I _have_ been paying attention, you know. You must tell them to make you a suit threaded with green, to display your pride in your tribe. Oh, and gold claws about the neck. You always did look lovely in yellow."

"Mother! I didn't come here to talk about fashion!"

"You came for advice, did you not?" the spider asked.

"Not about what to wear! Mother, my country has been taken over by a madman. My love is dead. And I ... I ..."

"You know exactly what to do," the spider said, her voice gentle as a brush of wind. "You always have, child. Ever since you were small. You will do well at this. Fashion advice is the only sort I have left to give, because it is the only kind you need. And I say this with all the love in my heart, but that basket hat you bought at the bazaar is not at all becoming. You should give it to your cousin; she has the kind of long face that is best suited to a broad hat ..."

Her voice was lost in the wind. 

"No, Mother, don't go," Nakia pleaded, caught between a fresh surge of grief and the hysterical urge to laugh disbelievingly. She couldn't even understand where the spider had gone; it was as if her mother had ducked sideways between the reeds and simply not come out again. "And I was _twelve_ when I bought that hat. I used to hide toads and baby snakes in it to sneak them into the house after Baba told me I wasn't allowed to have any more pets. ... Mother ...?"

She looked up, through the weeds, into the golden eyes of a great panther.

Nakia was frozen. The cat was no bigger than an ordinary panther, but it seemed vast enough to fill the world. It gazed at her from eyes like lamps, and then it lay down in the grass, only the tip of its tail twitching.

"My lady," Nakia whispered. "Great lady Bast." Should she bow? She was already sitting down, and she was afraid that scrambling to her feet to bow properly would be even worse, especially since she wasn't sure if this was actually Bast or one of Her handmaidens, perhaps even a different ancestor entirely. She tried dipping her head respectfully instead.

The panther stretched its mouth in a broad yawn, showing gleaming white fangs.

"I don't know what to _do,"_ Nakia told it, and as the words left her mouth, she woke abruptly with a gasp and a full-body jerk.

There was chaos around her. For a confused instant, she thought it was broad daylight -- that she'd slept through the night into morning -- and then she saw the lanterns, and realized it was in fact the opposite. Night had fallen, but she could see through it. To everyone else, it was pitch dark, and no one had seen her lying at the base of the rock face covered with snow.

Now she was just outside a ring of Border Tribe warriors in vibranium-laced blue cloaks. Ross was down in the snow with a spear through his thigh. Ramonda had her arms around Shuri, whose fists were clenched, vibranium glowing between her fingers.

"Stay back!" Shuri declared fiercely. "I will send it supercritical and blow us all sky-high if you come one step closer."

"She can't do that," one of the Border Tribe said, but he didn't sound sure.

Nakia climbed slowly to her feet. They still had not seen her. She moved with utter silence.

" _Take_ her!" the Border Tribe general declared. "Enough of this nonsense! Kill the outsider, take the Queen Mother and the princess. We'll let the King sort this out --"

He got no farther. Nakia jumped onto him from behind. Her hands curled like claws without her conscious direction, and she batted him hard enough to send him crashing into a rock. She was already whirling to kick another of them in the chest, slamming him into two of his friends and sending all three of them tumbling, screaming, down the mountainside.

It was over in seconds. She stood surrounded by the bodies of the wounded and the dead, gasping with reaction. None of them had managed to lay a hand on her. She had broken their bones, snapped their necks, crushed their sternums, while they were still trying to see her in the dark.

She had accepted long ago that a spy must be sneaky and underhanded. The fighting skills she had learned were those that could be performed by a woman alone, vastly outnumbered, surrounded by enemies with backup far away. She had learned to attack from the shadows, disable or kill if she must, and fade away. Now she had the skills of a spy in a body that was far faster, stronger, and more lethal than any ordinary human being.

 _I am not a protector,_ she thought, shocked and sick. _I am a killer._

But even as she looked down at her hands -- hands that had just killed -- a pair of warm arms were flung around her neck, and she was nearly bowled over by Shuri's effusive delight. "You're all right, you're all right," the girl gasped, clinging to her. "You did it. You saved us. You were amazing."

"Shuri!" Ramonda's voice carried a clear, ringing note of command. "We need your kimoyo beads."

She was crouching beside Ross, still lying where he had fallen trying to protect them. The snow around him was red with blood. Shuri untangled herself from Nakia and popped a kimoyo bead from her bracelet. Nakia didn't see exactly what Shuri did as she went down to her knees in the snow beside Ross, but it must have helped, because the strained look on his face eased somewhat.

"We just fixed you and now you get yourself damaged again," Shuri told him in a scolding tone with a slight quaver underneath.

"I know, careless of me," he gritted out. "Can I stand up, or would it be a bad idea?"

"Staying here would be worse," Ramonda said. "Nakia, are you well?"

"I am," Nakia said, though she was thinking that she would never truly be all right again.

 

***

 

The first rays of dawn were breaking through the sky, and they were much higher on the mountain -- Shuri and Nakia taking turns assisting Ross, his arm slung over one of their shoulders -- when the Jabari found them.

They were surrounded in moments by fur-clad warriors pointing spears at them. Nakia had given her cloak to Shuri and Ross to share between them (she no longer needed it) and she raised her bare arms and held her hands palm-out, trying to look harmless while wondering if she even knew how anymore.

The Jabari parted, and a large man strode through.

"Lord M'Baku," Nakia murmured.

M'Baku swept a curious, half-amused gaze across their motley group. Ross looked near collapse, leaving a trail of fresh blood through the snow once again; Shuri, supporting him, appeared defiant to the point of belligerence, while Ramonda had moved herself subtly to shield her daughter from the spear-wielding Jabari. 

Eventually M'Baku's gaze settled on Ramonda. He raised an inviting eyebrow.

"We seek sanctuary with you, Lord M'Baku," Ramonda said with quiet dignity.

"Oh? The royalty of Wakanda ignores our people unless they need us. Is that it?"

"This woman," Ramonda told him, indicating Nakia, "is the Black Panther. _Your_ Black Panther, as much as she is ours. The King is dead, and a pretender sits on the throne. This woman is the true protector of Wakanda."

M'Baku swept his gaze across them again, and then a smile broke out across his face, and he threw his head back and roared with laughter while they all stared at him as if he'd lost his mind. Finally he dropped back to sudden sobriety, and said: "I look forward greatly to seeing your faces in a few minutes. Come this way."


End file.
